Gender and Populism in Latin America: Passionate Politics (review)

Because most populist leaders have been men, the study of populism in Latin America has been a topic often ignored by feminist researchers, even though women are often targeted by populist policies or involved in populist politicking. Karen Kampwirth and 11 other contributors explore the gendered impacts of populist leaders and their governments from Mexico to Argentina, from the early twentieth century to the present day, from the community to the national level. They provide historical evidence and ethnographic descriptions to tell the story of how women throughout Latin America have led and are leading, following, challenging, accommodating, and conversing with populist leaders—even if this means talking at them instead of with them when they appear on television. Books that deal with Latin America often leave out Brazil or Central America; this volume, however, includes two chapters each on the populist tradition in Brazil and Nicaragua in addition to chapters about Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Argentina. The authors are respected scholars from academic institutions throughout the Americas, making this a volume representative of the Latin American experience on a number of levels.

To Kampwirth and the other authors, the essence of populism is the political machine created by personalistic political leadership in which a multiclass coalition, including marginalized sectors, redistributes goods to maintain popular sector support. Populism is defined and then examined in different epochs (early populists, neo-populists, and ethno-populists) with a gendered lens at different levels of society, showing how women have benefited or not, participated or not, and been excluded or not, compared to men.

This volume obliges readers to reflect critically on how women interact with populist leaders and their governments. Nicaraguan Somocismo in the early- to mid-twentieth century brought many women into politics and the workforce, increasing their access to housing and other resources. In Venezuela today, marginalized communities— and often their women leaders—negotiate the paternalistic, top-down projects called misiones to serve their communities' needs, choosing what is best for their communities and using leadership models in which men and women often participate together in making decisions. Multiple examples in this volume remind us never to underestimate the power of women's agency to transform their lives, their communities, and countries, even if the resources they are using come with strings attached.

Research on populism and women in Argentina, such as the works of Marifan Carlson (1988) and Daniel James (2000) and my own (2010), has occupied much of the airspace on women and populism in Latin America, limiting analysis to Argentina and inadvertently contributing to a narrow treatment of the tensions between feminists and populist leaders. Present-day Nicaragua, as described in this book, crystallizes the complexity feminists face when confronted with a populist leader and his policies. Many of today's feminists in Nicaragua began their activism as Sandinistas in the 1970s. Daniel Ortega himself started out as a revolutionary leader and nuevo hombre. But in order to regain power after losing the 1990 election, he brokered backroom deals with the far right, backtracked on historic Sandinista commitments to women's sexual and reproductive health, and allowed his supporters to argue that claims by his stepdaughter, Zoilamérica Narváez, that he sexually abused her when she was a girl are the angry recriminations of a scorned lover. Because feminists challenge these actions, Ortega and his government have labeled them as the enemy.

As Kampwirth and the other authors show, the tensions between feminists and populists have different manifestations country to country. In some cases, feminist organizers are marginalized or 'othered' as in Argentina or present day Nicaragua, or they negotiate and manage to collaborate with the government as in Bolivia and Venezuela. And as Stéphanie Rousseau cogently points out in her chapter about Peru and Bolivia, when populist leaders bring women from across sectors into government initiatives, their new situation may provide feminists with an opportunity to reconsider their own class and ethnic...